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This Won't Work: Short Stories
A new collection of tough, lean, funny crime stories from Preston Lang, author of Price Hike and The Blind Rooster. Most of these tales have appeared in the past two years in such venues as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Best American Crime Fiction 2019, and Tough Crime. Full of dead-end losers, inventive con artists, and dangerous emus, all told in clean, fast-paced prose and quick-witted dialogue, this volume is sure to please any fan of modern hardboiled fiction.
164 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 21, 2020
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September 3, 2020
This is a collection of Preston Lang’s short stories that have been previously published in magazines and journals but have been brought together in one volume and it was free on Amazon Kindle.
It’s an enjoyable collection of mainly crime related stories, that cross a broad church of topics, such as a murderous Emu, how do you ‘break’ a $1,000 dollar bill, are there aliens living among us, defending Tony Bennett’s honour and ‘that’ Phil Collins song. Some are quite humorous and others quite dark but all have that little sting in the tail that’s vital to a short story. Whether it’s telegraphed from a long way off or if it catches you unawares it’s a comforting ingredient to the genre.
Overall, a fine collection of stories that I probably wouldn’t have been able to track down otherwise.
It’s an enjoyable collection of mainly crime related stories, that cross a broad church of topics, such as a murderous Emu, how do you ‘break’ a $1,000 dollar bill, are there aliens living among us, defending Tony Bennett’s honour and ‘that’ Phil Collins song. Some are quite humorous and others quite dark but all have that little sting in the tail that’s vital to a short story. Whether it’s telegraphed from a long way off or if it catches you unawares it’s a comforting ingredient to the genre.
Overall, a fine collection of stories that I probably wouldn’t have been able to track down otherwise.
Displaying 1 of 1 review